I've spent the last three years traveling to 14 cities around the world, looking at how places as diverse as Copenhagen, Tokyo and Bogota are trying to escape congestion, pollution and sprawl by finding alternatives to the car. When people ask me which major U.S. city is at the cutting edge of forward-thinking transportation planning, they're always surprised when I reply that it is Los Angeles — those "72 suburbs in search of a city," according to the tired put-down — that is working hardest to improve transit. Some express astonishment that transit is an option in L.A. at all, which leads me to soliloquize, a la Joan Didion, on the "rapture-of-the-freeway" and the joys of strap-hanging in SoCal.

L.A. has a two-line subway, I tell them, running trains through cavernous stations, like the one at Hollywood and Vine, where the ceilings are covered with oversized film reels. (You can actually get to the Oscars by subway!) The Orange Line's buses shoot into the heart of the San Fernando Valley along dedicated busways. The articulated, air-conditioned buses look like something dreamed up by the set designer of "RoboCop"!) Connecting on one of the city's four light-rail lines can take you from Pasadena to Mariachi Plaza in East Los Angeles, or from Culver City to the Long Beach Aquarium. When you're downtown, or in more than a dozen other neighborhoods, you can hop a ride on the peppy, pint-sized DASH buses. (And get this: The fare is only half a buck!)

If Gov. Jerry Brown's plans go through, I add, someday your gateway to the city won't be LAX but the gorgeous Mission Revival-style Union Station, after a ride on the nation's most advanced bullet train.

Many Angelenos are surprised to learn that their city's reputation is at an all-time high among international transit scholars. This is the place, after all, that consistently ranks first in measures of commuter stress, as well as in hours wasted in traffic. (According to the Texas Transportation Institute's latest urban mobility report, traffic delays in Los Angeles now amount to half a billion hours a year.)

But it's important to remember that freeways, though they have become the city's de facto conduits for commuters, came relatively late. Los Angeles was originally a railway city, its early form set by the Southern Pacific Railroad and Santa Fe Railway. Its dispersed industrial suburbs were laced together by the inter-urban Red Cars of the Pacific Electric Railway and the local Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Railway, a public transit system that, before World War II, was considered by many to be the best in the world.

Outsiders may see freeway-driven sprawl ...

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... but metropolitan Los Angeles is actually more densely settled,

over its entire urban area, than the New York-Newark metro area.

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That makes the area ideally suited for the transit revival its leaders are trying to foster.

Los Angeles' problem, though, is that it also suffers from a chronic transit deficit. Although many European and Asian cities of comparable stature built urban highways in the 20th century, they did it in tandem with development of their metro and commuter rail systems. (Shanghai, for example, took just 16 years to build the world's largest metro system — one now more extensive, in terms of track mileage, than New York's subway.)

After decades of neglect, Los Angeles now finds itself playing catch-up on its rail and bus transit networks. To its credit, the county's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, is taking the long view. It is working hard to boost density to levels that will encourage ridership by entering into public-private partnerships that are turning station-proximate land into condo developments and multifamily dwellings, like Del Mar Station and 1600 Vine.

And in recessionary times, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has successfully lobbied for Metro to place a measure to extend a half-cent sales tax, which was first ratified by voters in 2008, on the November ballot. If approved, the extension of Measure R to 2069 would channel tens of billions of dollars to improving transit for decades to come — including a continuation of the Purple Line subway far into the Westside and, eventually, all the way to the Pacific.

The key, in a city with L.A.'s mix of ethnicity, languages and economic classes, is not to get caught up in turf wars. In city after city, I've seen how transit too often gets mired in ideology, when the discussion really needs to be about mobility — what works. A metropolis of Los Angeles' standing deserves as much rail transit as it can get.

But a city with a large population of working poor also deserves an efficient, comfortable network of frequently scheduled buses to mesh with heavy and light rail. About 78% of L.A.'s transit users get around on buses. The Metro Rapid system, which runs 36% faster than a regular bus line, is a good start. But for it to achieve its full potential, its buses need to run in dedicated busways — and, inevitably, that's going to mean taking away entire lanes from cars. I've seen successful bus rapid transit in action in such cities as Ottawa, Canada; Istanbul, Turkey; and Bogota, Colombia, and when buses consistently whip past lines of backed-up cars, even the most transit-phobic citizens start to weigh the merits of investing in a fare card.

On this front, the battle that has pitted the Bus Riders' Union against Metro rail supporters is a bogus one. Transit shouldn't be about either/or — about streetcars and buses versus subways, or rubber versus rail. It needs to be about anything that furthers genuinely sustainable mobility, which can include bike- and car-share programs, inter-city high-speed trains, even funiculars. (Bunker Hill's Angels Flight, it turns out, may have been an idea before its time!) In cities where transit efficiently serves both the suburbs and business districts, among them Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, and Zurich, Switzerland, intelligently scheduled feeder buses are used to boost the ridership of high-frequency mass transit rail systems.

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The real fight in Los Angeles is not going to be over issues such as methane pockets under Beverly Hills High but over whether street space now given over to the private automobile will go to public transit. The drivers I talked to in Los Angeles all acknowledged that their city needed better transit. But, they admitted, that didn't mean they planned on using it themselves. Too often, unfortunately, transit is seen as something the other person ought to be using.

That's too bad, because the Los Angeles I discovered riding the Blue Line to the Watts Towers, the Gold Line into deepest Pasadena, a DASH bus to the Grand Central Market and the Red Line to Koreatown and Hollywood and Vine is a pretty friendly, funky place. And that's something I never would have known if I'd spent all my time stuck on the freeway.

We must take a short tour of Helios House, Los Angeles, a useful learning lab for new technologies.

Helios House was opened in February 2007 in downtown Los Angeles by Office dA and it’s he first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified gas station in USA, created by BP, an international oil company. LEED is a certification that verifies green architecture and sustainability. It could sounds strange to associate an oil company with the environment but so it is. Two, pre-existing billboards on the site were incorporated in the building to attract attention to the station’s environmental and educational mission. A new learning lab.

The most beautiful element in the design of the station is the canopy, that covers all the pump bays and it has 90 solar panels that supply power for the station. The canopy is shaped in triangular stainless steel panels that can be removed and reused on other buildings. Surely an interesting way to build, very sustainable and useful in a world without resources. I hope it could be also applied in completely different type of buildings. Moreover, rainwater is collected by this large canopy and pumped to irrigate the plants around.

Helios House exceeds current environmental standards for on-site water collection and uses 16 percent less electricity than traditional gas stations. The lighting, LED lamps, is controlled by photocells and motion detectors to optimize times. Everything is designed not only to be a learning lab where green techniques can be tried out and passed on to other buildings , but also a meeting point for the visitors.

How would you like to scoot across West Hollywood in under two minutes in an enclosed mag-lev car, bypassing traffic congestion while utilizing the greenest transportation tech available?

That was the question posed when Nick Garzilli, Sustainable Transportation Executive for Evacuated Tube Transportation Technologies (ET3) and JPods presented the West Hollywood City Council Monday with an out of this world, futuristic transportation plan that would act as a pilot project demonstrating his company’s product.

He claims that the ET3 system “is faster than jets, yet can accomplish 50 times more transportation per kilowatt hour than electric cars or trains at 1/10th the cost.”

He asked for a letter of interest to allow his firm to develop a plan for the city that would allow ET3 to “connect to the Red Line and, when the subway is eventually built down there on Wilshire… to that.”

New high-tech airships are rising in Southern California
Southland aerospace firms are building the next generation of blimps and other airships.
By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times
September 1, 2012, 5:34 p.m.

Not since the waning days of World War II have the mammoth wooden blimp hangars at the former military base in Tustin seen as much airship manufacturing work as they do today.

Inside the 17-story structures that rise above southern Orange County, Worldwide Aeros Corp. is building a blimp-like airship designed for the military to carry tons of cargo to remote areas around the world.

"Nobody has ever tried to do what we're doing here," Chief Executive Igor Pasternak said of the 265-foot skeleton being transformed into the cargo airship. "This will revolutionize airship technology."

The Aeroscraft is being built under a contract of around $35 million from the Pentagon and NASA. That's a tall order for Worldwide Aeros, a company of about 100 employees.

On a recent visit to Southern California, I began my day in Claremont, where Iíd spoken the previous evening at a Pomona College event. I walked from a hotel near campus to the Claremont Metrolink station, where I grabbed a commuter rail train to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. From there I transferred to the L.A. Metroís Red Line and rode up to the Vermont/Santa Monica station and checked into a new hotel. I had lunch in that neighborhood, and later walked east to meet a friend for dinner and drinks in Silver Lake.

My father, a lifelong New Yorker and confirmed L.A. hater whose screenwriting work has frequently taken him to the City of Angels, found the idea of a carless California day pretty amusing. But the city thatís defined in the public imagination as the great auto-centric counterpoint to the traditional cities of the Northeast has quietly emerged as a serious mass transit contender. Itís no New York and never will beóLos Angeles was constructed in the era of mass automobile ownership, and its landscape will always reflect thatóbut itís turning into something more interesting, a 21st-century city that moves the idea of alternative transportation beyond nostalgia or Europhilia.

Los Angeles has made this remarkable and underappreciated shift because it has never stopped growing. The core Los Angeles municipality never experienced the kind of postwar population crash that afflicted Northern cities.

In 1940, there were 1.5 million people in the city. Twenty years later, it was almost 2.5 million. By 1990 it was close to 3.5 million. Today itís 3.8 million and still climbing. The larger metropolitan area has ballooned to 13 million residents, leaving Chicago in the dust as Americaís second city. And even though the area is built in a sprawling sunbelt format, the geography of surrounding mountains, ocean, and national forests physically constrains L.A.ís growth. Because of that, the average population density throughout the urban area is actually the highest in America even though the core is much less dense than an Eastern city like New York or Boston. The result was legendary traffic jams, combined with a practical inability to widen the arterial freeways that form the backbone of the cityís transportation infrastructure.

The usual response to too much traffic in the United States is to strangle growth. New development would mean more cars would mean more traffic, so cities adopt rules to block new development.

Thatís how San Mateo County between San Francisco and Silicon Valley managed to muster a measly 1.6 percent population growth in the past decade despite enviable access to two of the highest-wage labor markets in America. Over the past 20 years, however, L.A. has chosen the bolder path of investing in the kind of infrastructure that can support continued population growth, and shifting land use to encourage more housing and more people.

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The process started in earnest with the construction of the often-scoffed-about Red and Purple subway lines in the 1990s. This began to create the bones of a major rapid transit system. But itís kicked into overdrive in the 21st-century thanks to the confluence of three separate incidents. First, Rep. Henry Waxman, the powerful House Democrat who represents L.A.ís Westside, went from being a NIMBY opponent of transit construction to an environmentalist booster. Second, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2004. Third, in 2008, L.A. County voters passed Measure R, a ballot proposition that raised sales taxes to create a dedicated funding stream for new transit. Thanks to Measure R and Waxman, a new Expo Line connecting downtown to some of the Westside is already open, and work will begin on a ďsubway to the seaĒ beneath Beverly Hills soon. The same pool of money also finances expansion of the light rail Gold Line and the rapid-bus Orange Line while helping hold bus fares down.

In a less concrete-intensive vein, L.A. public policy has also embraced bicycling in the wake of a 2009 mayoral visit to Copenhagen, the world capital of bike infrastructure.

Perhaps most importantly of all, the city is acting to transform the built environment to match the new infrastructure. A controversial plan to rezone the Hollywood area for more density has passed. The city has also moved to reduce the number of parking spaces developers need to provide with new projects, following the lead of the smaller adjacent cities of Santa Monica and West Hollywood. A project to reconfigure Figueroa Boulevard running south from downtown toward Exposition Park as a bike-and-pedestrian friendly byway is in the works, and pending the outcome of a November ballot initiative, a streetcar may be added to the mix. At the northern end is the massive L.A. Live complex of movie theaters, restaurants, arenas, hotels, condos, and apartmentsóthe biggest downtown investment the city had seen in decades, constructed between 2005 and 2010. At the southern end of the corridor is the University of Southern California, which is planning to redevelop its own backyard to look a bit more like a traditional urban university village.

Los Angeles continues, like almost all American cities, to be primarily automobile oriented. But the policy shift is having a real impact on the ground. The most recent American Community Survey showed a 10.7 percent increase in the share of the metro areaís population that relies on mass transit to get to work, matched with a 3.6 percent increase in driving. And thatís before several of the key Metro projects have been completed or the waning of the recession can drive new transit-oriented development.

As work continues, people will find that Los Angeles has some attributes that make it an ideal transit city. Consultant and planner Jarrett Walker notes that the cityís long straight boulevards make it perfect for high-quality express bus service. And then, of course, thereís the weather. Something like a nine-minute wait for a bus, a 15-minute walk to your destination, or an afternoon bike ride are all more pleasant in Southern California than in a Boston winter or a sweltering Washington August. As a quirk of fate, the East Coast of the United States was settled first, so cities with large pre-automobile urban cores are clustered there. But the fundamentals of climate and terrain are more favorable to walking and transit in Los Angeles than in New York. The city could have simply stuck with tradition and stayed as the first great metropolis of the automobile era. But itís chosen instead to embrace the goal of growing even greater, which will necessarily mean denser and less auto-focused. While the Bay Area and many Northeastern cities stagnate under the weight of oppressive zoning codes, L.A. is changingóby designóinto something even bigger and better than it already is.

Elon Musk Thinks He Can Get You From NY to LA in 45 Minutes
BY DAMON LAVRINC07.15.134:06 PM

Elon Musk wants to revolutionize transportation. Again. The serial entrepreneur envisions a future where mag-lev trains in enormous pneumatic tubes whisk us from Los Angeles to New York in 45 minutes. Need to be in Beijing tomorrow? No problem. Itís a two-hour ride away.

As crazy as it sounds, Musk is merely updating an idea thatís been around since the early 1900s, and at least one company is working on a functional prototype. But according to Wired sources, his involvement wonít be nearly as hands-on as Muskís other endeavors at Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Firm working on Elon Musk's Hyperloop leases space in L.A.'s Arts District

A company behind the futuristic, high-speed transportation system fantasized by Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk has leased warehouse space in downtown Los Angeles and is rapidly adding new workers to a staff of 20 full-time employees.

Musk's imaginary Hyperloop would use vacuum tubes to transport freight and passengers at speeds of 750 mph, racing from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. Until recently, it's been little more than an idea.

Now Hyperloop Technologies Inc., one company working on the project, has taken up residence for Hyperloop World Headquarters in a 6,500-square-foot industrial space in a gentrifying section of the Arts District.